Popular reviews

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 19

  This is a film of the elements.

  Between the constant wind, the need for water, the dirt and mud, and the light of small, flickering flames, this film is the sum total of reality. In the midst of all of these is the aether, the fifth element that controls movement and light. In this case, the aether is the camera, which moves fluidly about our sparse subjects and observes, yet also commands their fates in a metatextual way. The aether is Tarr's storytelling.

  The wind is the uncontrollable power that sweeps away everything. It is the horse's refusal to work and the inevitability of the end. It is constant, grating, and brutal, and it drives those who attempt to move…

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  Review by Edgar Cochran ★★★★★ 33

  First Day: Food and shelter
  Second Day: Touching, acquiring and therefore debasing
  Third Day: God watches all over you
  Fourth Day: Scarcity
  Fifth Day: Darkness and silence
  Sixth Day: Mortality

  Predominant elements throughout the days: A storm raging outside and moving everything that can be found in the air and on the ground, like trying to reach a destination, shadows, cotidianity occupying three alienated souls (two humans, one animal), a strong wind heard while outside, ghastly and scary wind sounds from the inside, repentance, mysteries unspoken, emotional detachment, water and potatoes.

  Bonus feature: Presented in the Second Day: A destructive critique to civilization throughout the centuries against authority and other godly figures attempting to establish their false omnipresence above everybody…

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  Review by PTAbro ★★★ 39

  Listen.

  The wind blows.

  We watch a moving world. We do not move ourselves.
  We are Pygmalion in reverse. Our daily routine is the chisel, turning us to stone.
  We wait. We ignore. We transform.
  Time stops.

  The wind blows.
  It sucks our breath, it drowns our words.
  Actions speak louder. Actions can match the wind.
  Nature versus routine. An eternal battle to wear away our stone facade.
  Both with the same goal, reward, curse. Stone or dust.
  Winner signaled by brief panic, then stone or dust.
  Time stops.

  The wind blows.

  Listen.

  ***

  I'd like to place a reservation on my rating for The Turin Horse for now. Béla Tarr is a director I've long been wanting to experience,…

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  Review by Naughty aka Juli Norwood ★★★★★ 5

  Some refer to this as a masterpiece whereas I prefer the term "cinematic crack"

  A horrible act committed against the only thing keeping their heads above water sets off a chain reaction from which there is no recovery!

  Stark, simplistic harsh realities, weathered wood and weathered faces! depressingly bleak, life for them is an exercise in complete and utter futility! Trapped in a prison of their own design! Their lives, hearts and souls are as cold and empty as the bird cage hanging in their decrepit hovel!

  Brutal and uncompromising parable at its finest, an ugliness that goes far deeper than skin deep! And it is in this ugliness we find a compelling story, we find truth, we find painfully birthed beauty!

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  Review by DirkH ★★★★½ 13

  More an experience than a film, Béla Tarr's The Turin Horse is one of the bleakest and most depressing pieces of art I have ever encountered. And at the same time it is one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.

  Tarr's film builds on a thought, a musing (taken from the film's synopsis): 1889. German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche witnessed the whipping of a horse while traveling in Turin, Italy. He tossed his arms around the horse's neck to protect it then collapsed to the ground. In less than one month, Nietzsche would be diagnosed with a serious mental illness that would make him bed-ridden and speechless for the next eleven years until his death. But whatever did…

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  Review by Justin Peterson ★★★★★ 4

  (Foreign language film - Hungarian)

  A drawn-out cinematic display of life slowly wasting away ... which is strangely both incredibly bleak, yet often darkly amusing as well.

  "....this is the way it was until the final victory, until the triumphant end; acquire, debase, debase, acquire; or I can put it differently if you'd like, to touch, debase and thereby acquire, or touch, acquire and thereby debase; it's been going on like this for centuries...."

  I am thinking that making it through Béla Tarr's 7+ hour extremely slow-burn film experience 'Satantango' is a requirement, in order to put a film like the two and a half hour Turin Horse into perspective. Since the long shots in this somehow almost feel brisk…

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  Review by Paul Elliott ★★★★★ 2

  Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr delivers a completely outstanding masterclass in black and white cinematography in this movie. Shot in only 30 long takes, with a one hundred and forty six-minute runtime, it's a philosophical drama in which a rustic farmer is required to confront the mortality of his devoted horse. It's an austere story of melancholy as well as the antithesis of frenetic and fast-paced editing which contains some meticulous attention to detail which accentuates the framing as the proponent of narrative impetus. The Turin Horse may well be the magnum opus of slow cinema.

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  Review by olivia ★★★★★ 16

  "what's it all about, papa?"
  "i don't know."

  "the gale roars relentlessly around the house."

  "because everything's in ruins, everything's been degraded, but i could say that they've ruined and degraded everything. because this is not some kind of cataclysm. [...] on the contrary, it's about man's own judgement, his own judgement over his own self."

  "the heavens are already theirs, and theirs are all our dreams. theirs is the moment, nature, infinite silence. even immortality is theirs, don't you understand? everything, everything is lost forever."

  "the storm continues to rage outside; the wind still sweeps relentlessly across the land from the same direction, but now there is nothing in its path to obstruct it. only a great cloud of…

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  Review by Lise ★★★★½ 11

  This is one of those cases where my rating is for the merits of the film and not my preferences. As beautiful as this film is, I could only recommend it to those who are particularly interested in seeing the daily routines and harshness of 19th Century country living, or to serious fans of Tarkovskiy, who are used to slow long shots where not much happens on the screen.

  The Turin Horse.

  It is gorgeous. Every shot is one of the most beautiful photographs you will ever see.
  It sounds beautiful. The score and the harsh wind are almost indistinguishable, both playing the same melody.
  The art direction is perfect. Every single dented pot, every crack in the wall, every…

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  Review by Wes ★★★★★ 1

  "The heavens are already theirs, and theirs are all our dreams."

  long lost post apocalypse Jeanne Dielman cousin we never asked for or deserved, but got anyway. even that seems selling it short; this stuff is like being in the eye of a hurricane. the last gasp of wind water earth and fire. i feel like béla tarr would give really suffocating hugs.

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  Review by Steve Moyle ★★★★★ 10

  This is my second Béla Tarr film with the first having been Werckmeister Harmonies boxd.it/NVdqL and I think it's safe to say that I'm definitely ready for Satantango which I've wanted to see for such a long time. It originally might have been my first Tarr film if I was able to find it as easily as I found these other two but maybe it's best that I saw these ones first as I now have a reasonably good understanding of what to expect. I also really need to find the right time when I'm able to be alone without any kind of distractions before I get to Satantango and at this point in my life I'm not sure when…

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  Review by Warp ★★★★★ 9

  Absolutely Béla Tarr’s Magnus Opus

  Tarr’s take on the apocalypse in reverse order of God who created the world in six days. Everything He made now slowly stops working, where on the seventh day the light stops shining. In the beginning a link with Nietzsche is made, namely the horse that Nietzsche would have seen on the street be beaten, after which he fell around the neck sobbing and never wrote again in his life. It’s actually based on a myth in a dream sequence in Dostoevsky’s (which was an inspiration for Nietzsche himself) brilliant novel ‘’Crime and Punishment’’. 

  “To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering” is a well-know quote by Nietzsche,…